Film Show 071: John Torres

John Torres (b. 1975) is a Filipino filmmaker who has spent over two decades making poetic diary films that ruminate on family, history, and memory. His work fictionalizes and reworks found documentation and personal footage, mixing the autobiographical with folklore, narrative conventions with the forthrightly experimental. Initially grouped with other filmmakers during the 2000s like Lav Diaz and Raya Martin, he is one of the key figures of the Philippine New Wave. Some of his most remarkable films include Todo Todo Teros (2006), Years When I Was a Child Outside (2008), and People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016). And while he’s made several other films throughout his career, his newest film marks a major turning point: The Remotes (2026) is his first real-deal fiction feature, complete with big-name Filipino actors and a more conventional story. Still, Torres’ approach to capturing dreamlike atmospheres—aided in part by slow pacing and extreme quietude—elevate it beyond its simple classification as a sci-fi neo-noir. The Remotes premieres at this year’s editions of TIFF and NYFF. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Torres on September 6th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss how his mother inspired his new film, playing in a rock band with Lav Diaz, and how grief leads to people wanting to be controlled.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Your new film, The Remotes (2026), starts with a scene set in the Chicagoland area—we see a CTA bus. I know that you moved over here from the Philippines and I’m curious what that experience has been like for you.

John Torres: The film was written over 6 years, and it maybe even started before the pandemic as an idea. While making it, we were thinking of a faraway place that people could go to escape. We wanted some place cold. The idea to shoot in Evanston was quite practical, and I shot with my phone. I was very happy to have this opportunity to shoot in winter, as it was the first time for our kids to have this different experience of space.

What sort of things have you learned about yourself since raising kids, and has that made you reflect on your own relationship with your parents? I know this film was made, in part, as a response to your mother’s wish to see you make a “real movie.”

Parenthood prepared me for the inevitability of the cycles of time. In the Philippines we had such a long lockdown—it stretched two and a half years. We started with just one child, but then through the pandemic we had two. I still had this question of how we could be making work as artists, but I was also embracing being a parent. It allowed me to find where I was at and to find certain limitations that could inspire me to work. Not having things is really important for my process. I had much less sleep, and there was a creative resistance, and I really had to feel this dreamscape in order to move forward.

I also had to teach in confined spaces on Zoom. I’d tell my students how we could still make work, and I titled one of our courses “Lockdown Filmmaking.” I gave rules, and I said that we should make films by finding where we are. I wanted to make something fictional because it was framed early on by my mother’s wish to make a “real film.” She would say this to me, and what she was referring to was ’80s and ’90s Filipino movies. There was slightly unsynced audio for these films back then, but it was very expressive. It was also very celebrity-focused. So this was my mother’s wish. She was still alive then, but she sadly passed during the first wave.

So the context of me as a son and me as a parent coincided very well, but we had to see where we were. It seemed impossible to work together at the time, especially with the death of my parent—we had to be very cautious—but maybe there could be a workaround. I would teach my students about the 180-degree rule, and we had fun. And maybe this was a way forward, but I also wanted to see if I could go on-site. It turned out that I had only three hours—teams could take turns and be isolated and work in this way. There was an opportunity to pitch this project as a hybrid documentary, and I made a short film that was screened at [TIFF] Wavelengths in 2020. It was proof that this could work. And then there was an opportunity to pitch this project at Cannes Docs. Nothing substantial came about, but it allowed me to see how everything could open worldwide, including in the Philippines. It then became possible to be on-site, and it led to a shift. I realized that I could do this as a fiction film. I switched into this mode and made it as a tribute to my mother.

I got an invitation to make work for a performance piece at the Singapore International Festival of Arts. Being very practical, I got the funds to have this piece expanded into a feature film, which became Act 2 of the film. This was 2022, I think. Me and a filmmaker friend of mine wrote a script. This was going to be a real film, with pre-production and casting and actors, including a celebrity in the case of Enchong Dee. He was someone that my mother would know if she were to watch the film. So this process resulted in a 40-minute cut that served as a proof of concept. And with things eventually opening up, there was a production market at QCinema International Film Festival that I participated in and I got financial support. I pitched this as my first (with emphasis) fiction fiction film (laughter).

We only had the script for Act 2, but I told the actors at the time that I would do a full feature around this. I told them I’d see them again after we had the funds for the next part. It took a lot of time between the first and second phases, but there was a lot of writing going on during all this. It took about four years until we made everything else, which was Act 1, 3, and 4.

I know you were born in 1975. Was this in Manila?

Yes, Manila. I never lived anywhere else for this long until I came to Illinois. It’s the longest I’ve been away from the country, and it’s only been one year—I came on August 18th.

What was it like growing up in Manila in the 1970s and ’80s? Obviously there was a lot going on politically, but I’m curious about the things you specifically remember and associate with that time.

One important thing is that there was no internet. We had to be bored and play with our friends outside. We’d always be on the move, and there was this freedom; we were wandering about and moved by instinct. I grew up in a not-so-wealthy neighborhood, but my father made a business that grew and allowed us to move into a bigger space within an exclusive subdivision. We had to go to an exclusive school, and I missed all the fun I had before this when I was freely moving about. The school I went to was a Jesuit school, and it was liberal and fun, but around the time that the Marcos dictatorship was coming to an end, I had an important realization. I was wearing a Marcos/Tolentino campaign shirt during the snap election in the ’80s. And why? It was because my parents came from the Solid North where Marcos had support. I had to deal with that later on. At the time, I felt good about wearing the shirt and felt bad about the People Power Revolution that was happening. I had to deal with that, and that’s something that seeps into my body of work.

Apart from that, my father had a darkroom and a photo lab at the back of our house. He would always spend time there with an assistant who would process his photos. These photos were of us, of me, and I’d be on the cover of his self-published books. It’d be pictures of me with double exposure, illustrating things. They weren’t fiction—they were self-help, instructional books. His main slogan was “Raising Brighter Children.” Apart from these photos, I would also go into the darkroom and see how photos were developed. It was magical. I’m sure you don’t know this, but Lynda Carter, who was Wonder Woman at the time in the 1980s, went to Manila and had a concert. There was a big printout on the wall and I was like, “Wow, my dad’s amazing. We have this thing that nobody else has.” Other than that, it was basketball—I played basketball with my friends. The [court] was situated near the house and we’d have parties there.

My father’s assistant would also have time to do his own stuff. When my dad was away, my assistant would show me proofs of photos he took and it was photos of naked women. I didn’t know how to feel about them, really. But being 12 or 13 years old, I think I appreciated them. It was like, wow, nice (laughs). It really shocked me because of the camera, the image, and all these things that you could do yourself. There was your own personal gaze of things and this control you had over what you could capture. Eventually, I learned through high school how to piece things together using tape decks. And if I had to revise things structurally, I’d have to start over from scratch. When editing, there was no precise moment when the scene would be punched in, or how to choose things frame by frame. It’d involve timing the record button between 1 and 2 seconds. I was anticipating the moment I wanted to start shooting and then press the button. It was trial and error, and I had this rhythm. This was also around the same time that I was dabbling with the guitar. Rhythm was really integral to everything I did.

This was also when videotapes were being peddled around in the streets. Our doorbell would ring and this man would have a big bag and ask us to rent these Betamax and VHS tapes. What was magical was that when watching these tapes, feature films would have bonus features, and you’d see the tape transfer between these different parts and glitch. My dad and mom would always take us to the cinema too, and since things weren’t in sync, it contributed to the magic of technical imperfections, of these magical slippages of what you wanted to convey both intentionally and not.

Was it important that your dad’s assistant showed you these photos? Was it about understanding what it meant to be an artist?

Yeah. Things were always wholesome and meant to be seen by other people. This was something different—it was something private, something that others shouldn’t see—so there was this feeling that I could make things that could be a secret. It was like, “Is this okay? Would my teacher allow this? Would my parents allow it?” But even if they didn’t see it, it would still exist.

So it was this notion that another utility for art existed?

It meant that in the future, I could have my own path even if I didn’t have others’ approval. I could make something that people didn’t agree with, and it’d still exist simply because I made it. I still consider myself an outsider—I didn’t go to film school or have any formal training—so maybe I would’ve stopped making works if I didn’t experience this. I never thought a film could be made of diary footage, with footage of other people who didn’t know they were being filmed. And of course this has its own questions, but the reality is that I made these works, the questions followed, and I processed the questions after. If I constrained myself back then and said, “No, I shouldn’t do that,” then maybe I wouldn’t have made those first few films. The feature I made, Todo Todo Teros (2006), was essentially a collection of diaries.

It’s hard not to think about your early short film, Salat (2004), too. It’s in the way your footage looks, how it’s all dark and intimate.

Because I didn’t go to film school or any film workshops, I thought that it wasn’t a film. And my mother didn’t see it as a film either. It was more so a diary because these were my old friends. That was the feeling I had when I made the first few films, including Salat. It was about seeing how I could do things, how I could express something. A friend of mine saw my films and said, “Hey, these are films, maybe we can share them with others.” I went to my first film festival in 2005 in Singapore and I thought, well, this is a film festival, so maybe I am making films. And that’s when I decided to expand on it and make Todo Todo Teros. It was a long path, but I’m glad that I took it.

You were talking about this disjunction between sound and image for these Filipino films back then, and your experience of those works gets further refracted through time and memory. I’m wondering if there were any films you remember seeing—both in theaters or from those rented tapes—that stood out for you.

Oh my gosh, yeah. Most of the films I could reference were mainstream Filipino films. Lino Brocka, not so much actually. It was more rom-coms and teen dramas. In the 2000s, when we had this big house, the biggest celebrity at the time was there in our home. It was Nora Aunor. Ishmael Bernal and Lino Brocka would work with her. I woke up one day, went down the stairs, and there were a group of people and a lot of lights. There she was with her leading man. I just woke up from a nap and it was like… okay (laughter).

There were a lot of cameras and I’d see her cry. I’d see her crossing the line of sight of the camera, she’d play with the crowd, she’d switch on and off between her performances. I remember kicking something on the ground in the garage and someone said “stop!” and then picked up the object and placed it back on the ground for continuity (laughter). I didn’t know what continuity was, but I knew I disturbed whatever world was here. I wouldn’t say that this was the starting point for when I wanted to make movies, but there was this magic you could construct, and I saw it.

Did people often shoot films in your home?

No, I guess it was just that the people wanted to film in our house because it fit what they were looking for. Nora Aunor and her family were there and I remember my mom talking with them. We’d be invited to films, too. There was one called I Love You Mama, I Love you Papa (1986) and it was a mainstream Regal Films film and we would take part as extras for this one scene—a birthday party. I was there! I was told not to look at the camera (laughter).

So you were familiar with the film world in some regard when you were young. Were you ever involved with pito-pito films with Good Harvest? You started making films in the early 2000s and you were already in your late 20s at this time, so I’m curious what was happening in between all this. [Editor’s Note: In the late ’90s, Regal Films created Good Harvest as a way to make low-budget “pito-pito” (aka “seven-seven”) films, which would go through pre-production, production, and post-production in seven days each. The budget was 2.5 million pesos (approximately 65,000 USD) compared to the typical 12 million, and the films would feature no major stars].

After school, it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do. I had a camera and would film my everyday life. I definitely knew about pito-pito—this idea to rush things and do something cheaply and haphazardly. It made me realize that things were possible, but since nobody was teaching me about film in a classroom setting, I didn’t get to see a lot of what would change me later on. Around that time, I would see the films of Kidlat Tahimik, like Perfumed Nightmare (1977). His films were very valuable to me. Later, I learned that Lav Diaz took part in the pito-pito process, so he had his own path to filmmaking. With Todo Todo Teros, he was there, and we were together at festivals. We’d have a lot of fun together, we’d hang out, and we were unserious about Q&As (laughter). I think it was in Rotterdam when Khavn [de la Cruz] asked me to be his unofficial interpreter. He would blabber on in gibberish to the crowd and I’d have to interpret (laughter). There was this spirit of play around these formal settings and it was like, “Oh, we can do this. It can still be fun.”

What was going through your mind during the early to mid-2000s? People were stating that there was this new wave of Filipino filmmaking. There was Raya Martin, too. Did you feel like there was something uniquely Filipino about the works you guys were making beyond the content itself? Was there something stylistically Filipino?

It’s nice that you ask that because this was a time when Raya, Khavn, Lav, Roxlee, and I would all end up at the same festivals. We’d travel together. For example, we’d go to Singapore and then be invited to Malaysia by a Malaysian new wave filmmaker, Tan Chui Mui, and her production group. We’d visit and still be unserious (laughs), but they had their own office and their own efficient workflow and we saw all this. We realized they made different films, but it kind of felt like it was in the same ballpark, at least for me. For us Filipino filmmakers, we’d also collaborate on each other’s works and have this energy to support each other, even play in a band together and have performances. I guess that was more of what this all was, you know? It was this energy. They would call it Philippine New Cinema but… we were from the Philippines, yes, but we were just being unapologetically ourselves and supporting one another.

Right, you guys all had these different backgrounds. You didn’t go to film school, Lav Diaz had these experiences making pito-pito films, Roxlee was a cartoonist. How do you feel like you stood out at the time? Do you feel like you had a specific voice that was unique to you?

At the time, I was the only one from the group leaning towards documentation of everyday life and repurposing them into works that are not strictly non-fiction. There was no need to explain what I was doing to them because they already knew, and I also knew what they were doing. Like, I knew I wasn’t going to make stuff like their films, but I understood them and respected the energy around what they were doing. We asked each other for feedback, we gave each other space, and that’s all we could ever ask for. I haven’t mentioned this one central figure yet, who is Sherad Anthony Sanchez. He’s younger than me, and he made films at this time too. He was able to look at our films with a sharp eye and I benefited so much from him; he was an important person in this friendship.

Oh yeah, Imburnal (2008) is kind of the hidden gem of 21st-century Filipino cinema.

Wow, thank you for saying that. Yes. We were also involved with his projects, and he is now part of The Remotes as a producer.

Can you tell me a little about the band you guys were in and the music you played? I’m not too familiar with Filipino rock music in the ’90s and 2000s aside from Eraserheads, Pinikpikan, and Daydream Cycle. How do you feel like your time making music shaped the way you approached filmmaking?

Wow, okay. Well, my own journey was that, since I grew up in the 1980s, there was a lot of hair metal. Fortunately I had big hair, and I really wanted to style it that way (laughter). I was shredding a lot on my guitar, and so I was into speed and precision. I had this black Charvel guitar with a 1988 body with a fast fretboard. In high school I had a band, but I didn’t have the skills at the time to make hair metal so I started with new wave covers—in the Philippines there was The Dawn, but I also listened to New Order. It was actually magical because we would listen to tapes and slow them down with the Akai machine, and I would transpose everything because the notes were lower. I had my own metal band in college, and of course Metallica was big. Grunge was also peaking, and there was this feeling that my first love of hair metal and shredding was dead. I had to go through these dirty and undisciplined types of music, but I think that informed what I would listen to later on. It was all very amateur, and we would play at public events—nothing really big. Then I got to play again with Khavn and Lav and we were just making things up, you know? We had this energy where it didn’t matter if our drummer didn’t know how to play.

What did they all play?

Khavn was on keyboards, but he knew a lot more—he was the most talented of all of us. Lav would play acoustic guitar but also lead guitar. He had more of this blues influence and he would play more free. And then I would play guitar and be in my own space. Roxlee was more of a performer and would do things for the crowd—he was very Rox.

Was he the singer?

I would say Khavn was kind of leading it if not for Rox… Rox was the crowd favorite. He was really good with harmonica as well. He was such a rock star. He’d put on costumes and throw things at people along with Khavn while Lav was just the cool one with long hair (laughter). I’d be very nervous, like, “How should I play this?” I learned to just be free. We performed as a band in one of Lav’s films [Melancholia (2008)]. That was our shot at immortality (laughter). Lav has since distributed his own music.

You were talking about how your mom wanted to see you make a “real film,” which would have to involve celebrities. You talked about the actors, how she knew Enchong Dee, but there’s also someone like Julia Richards who’s an influencer. This is of course a very different film from your previous work, and I was curious if there was going to be anything experimental about it. You have the one scene with the superimposition of the eyeball and the road, which is of course reminiscent of the beginning of People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016).

I couldn’t help myself (laughter).

I’m curious what it was like to make this fiction film. Even when a parent dies, they’re never really dead in a way—the things they said still linger with you.

I made my best effort to make this film for her. Even if this was something I only said in my thoughts, I knew that she would hear me, and I knew that she would see the film. As I’m delivering the film right now to TIFF, she has seen the film. But it also goes beyond that, like, maybe fiction filmmaking is really for me. Maybe this is how I want to make things sustainable as someone who now has a family. I’ve had my successes and I’m no longer a new filmmaker to be discovered, so now might be the chance to see what I can do. And I do enjoy it. I might want my kids to see the films I make now, too. So this was an effort to earnestly see a path between very big international co-productions and very limited local productions. I wanted to have a voice that was still personal, but I wanted to explore. And that came with pre-production, planning, and working with actors who might not know how I work and who might not want to delve into improvisation. But even though this film looks different, I think the pulse of things—the rhythms, the beats—remain. I’m quite pleased to know that it’s also possible, and I want to take steps to push myself into making more films in this way.

The voiceover and the film’s quietude function in a way that text might have in your previous works. It still acts to provide a sense of intimacy and smallness, and the nighttime scenes of course make me think of your older films too. Do you mind talking about the decision-making behind the pacing and the voiceover, as well as the two scenes that provide disruption in the film—the sex scene and the concert. Those scenes are almost uncanny and disorienting because of how much they contrast the rest of the film.

With those ruptures, it was part of my overall process of thinking about the film’s length. I was finding a way to help you understand that we’re in a dream space, so I’m glad you refer to them as uncanny. Those scenes feel like we’re being rushed and controlled, and the voiceover can also be something that inhabits this confusion regarding what or who you can trust. During the gig scene, we cut to [detective] Mijares in this other room. You can still hear the concert, but at the same time this voice appears and you’re not really sure what it is—is he drunk, is it within the diegetic space? I wanted to emphasize all these things, of jumping from one place or state to another. That was how I felt during the pandemic, of seeing the impossibility of the image and sound represent my day because all I could see were the walls and ceiling surrounding us. And with my mother passing, there was this idea of the voice being a ghost presence.

It’s interesting what you were talking about earlier with the disjunction between sound and image in mainstream Filipino films because in The Remotes you have one of these self-help phone apps meant for grieving. It recalls all those health and lifestyle apps with ambient music and calming voices or encouraging text.

It’s cult-like (laughter).

I like that there is this continued theme of disruption, that there is this peculiar and ongoing relationship with a disembodied voice from older Filipino films to your own “real film.”

I want to make a disclaimer that growing up, my father would allow us to watch VHS tapes of self-hypnosis videos (laughter).

Did you ever get hypnotized?

I don’t know—maybe? But I was thinking about that very seriously, this power of summoning, the power of the voice. I was also thinking about the power of the voice in high worship. By the time I was in college, I was going through personal things and had a broken heart. I was also into ministry, in terms of charismatic high worship. I’d close my eyes, hear the voice, and have a presence of the wind and a meditative state. I’m very at home with having the voice inhabit that of a cult leader, or as my mother reaching out, or even a navigation app. You just want to hear and believe personal things and imagine them as those you’re familiar with.

When you hear people speaking in tongues, you recognize that there’s a certain prosody to all this. In the film, you hear the woman repeating the same line multiple times for the app, changing her tone to get things just right, and I’m curious if you have any thoughts on these sort of rhythms with which people speak as a way to elicit emotion. And with technology utilizing human voices—or voices that sound human—there’s this sense that we’re no longer trusting ourselves to do things, and that we need to remove this sense of the robotic or other to assuage that lack.

A very important thing I must note is that the high-worship voice prompts us to say one name… the point was to say “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” But this was Jesus as a spirit who would come to us, and I thought of that for a scene in Act 2 and expanded on some things. I recently spoke to a friend of mine on the phone who was grieving, and he said that he felt almost robotic. And this was not in the context of talking about the film, but there is this sense in the Philippines that during Duterte’s time, you’d like to be grieving because then there was a much more powerful voice—from the president, for example—who would control you. We were grieving because of personal and political circumstances, and it was like this voice would actually know much more about ourselves, and this could also be through the devices that speak to us, through notifications that were very personal, through our feeds. This is a practical way for how people keep moving—we’re too tired, and grief has allowed us to want to be controlled.

It’s interesting you say that because I know multiple people now who look to ChatGPT to provide answers for their life. It’s pretty frightening because some of them just hand over all their diary entries to it. There’s this sense that they need to have an answer, and it’s easier for it to come from something else, for us to not make the decisions ourselves. There’s a lot of different things that feed into that behavior.

People are throwing everything into the void and there’s nothing there. Well, there’s data, and it tells you in a polite way that it understands what you’re going through. And it’s quite seductive, actually, knowing that there’s no person you’re giving your darkest secrets to. In reality, you’re giving it to these companies that are taking all your data. The production process, especially the first stage of making the film, was during a time when generative AI wasn’t really in the mainstream. The only thing people did is make these crude, hallucinatory images. And then suddenly it became the norm. I didn’t want to be boring about generative AI, just saying that it was right or wrong, but I did want to have a loose discussion about it, and in this case it was about voices and how we’re seduced by technology.

Earlier you said you were contending with your upbringing, how you were in this nicer neighborhood and wearing a Marcos shirt. How have you grappled with that and how do you continue to navigate that with your films?

I graduated from a good school in a wealthy neighborhood, and what was important for me at the time was to ask why I didn’t confront my parents about Marcos. I eventually did, and I am continually doing so through my body of work, though in an indirect way. We actually lost that house and all of my family’s fortune was gone. We moved to a smaller home. This is when I made my second film, Years When I Was a Child Outside (2008). This was for my father. It was a time when we lost everything, and losing everything meant I lost the comfort of the bubble we were inhabiting. With my films I started thinking, “Who is my father? What do I believe?” My father was my hero, and then he turned into someone else, though he was someone I still loved. I made this work and there was this tension, like, “Is this hurtful to my father? Is this hurtful to my family? Who’s to blame? Is it me? Is it the government?”

Are there filmmakers or artists who have shaped the way you approached this sort of diaristic filmmaking?

I already mentioned Kidlat Tahimik, but I like Robert Bresson, Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold. I like what little I’ve seen of Jonas Mekas. I also like to make films like Aki Kaurismäki. I know this has little to do with diaristic filmmaking, but I like to pick and choose from all my inspirations. I want to meet Hong Sang-soo when I’m in New York. I really admire his ongoing spirit of making films in his own way and on his own.

It’s interesting that you mention Bresson, Schanelec, and Petzold because the acting in those films runs counter to what I typically think of with the Philippines, where the acting can be a lot more dramatic.

Especially with the confrontation between Mijares and Jill, I felt like it was an ode to how mainstream acting is [in the Philippines]. Still, it’s not the most outward thing you’d see in the country (laughter). I find myself reining myself in to have these contrasts, to have these variations. I do have those peppered in the film, especially with how the sisters present themselves as cult leaders. At the same time, I’d have improvised scenes, like in the vehicle with the two sisters when one is asking about the other’s sister. It creates this tension of, like, “Wait, are they really sisters? What’s happening?”

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m still unafraid to make work. With every film, I’ve made a decision to make it and to show it.

John Torres’ new film, The Remotes, plays at this year’s edition of TIFF and NYFF.

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